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Cross Channel Book Marketing

My new book Creating Comics from Start to Finish is just beginning to hit stores now. And despite the fact that I do this marketing thing every day for my clients, I’ve found it to be challenging to apply the same principals at home for my own projects. Crazy, right?

There’s an old saying, “the shoemaker’s children go barefoot.” That pretty much means the stuff you do at work is not the stuff you want to do when you get home. But a book being published is a timely event, and that time will soon pass, so I need to take the opportunity to market my book while I still can.

Initially, I was spending most of my efforts on my Facebook Fan Page, which had around 700+ followers and is now over 800. This group has been supporting my photo reference books, so they were most receptive of the new book. A good start.

Then I did a little bit of content seeding. I created a video flip through of my book, which I placed on the Facebook Fan Page, YouTube, Flickr, and even Amazon. I’m monitoring all of the channels through Google Analytics to see which drives the most qualified traffic.
And then there was that little problem of my landing page. I was driving everyone to my personal website. That makes sense, except that my website is a bit out of date, to put it mildly. It’s not a bad site, it’s just not as attractive as it once was. So I decided to move all of my books and CD-ROMs to a new site.

As of this writing, Comic Book School is now in development. First off, it’s a good URL name. People may not know my name, but they understand the value proposition of a comic school. I used WordPress to create a nice home for the new book and the old books. That will cross-pollinate the products.

I’m working with book publicist Kate Travers now, and she’s pushing me to do more. She’s got actual good book marketing experience and even know online promotions, which is pretty exciting. I’m feeling energized by her input and ideas.

So at Kate’s suggestion, I’ve updated my old profiles on social sites and I’ll be content seeding on StumbleUpon, Vimeo, DeviantArt and other places. Quite honestly, I should be doing all of this without any prompting. I know all of the concepts and actually recommend many of them to my clients.

But, y’know, just like the shoemaker….I guess the marketer’s own children go unpublicized. That is, until now. Stay tuned, and I will keep you up to date, my fellow marketers!